We’ve got less than a month left until November 1st and the start of National Novel Writing Month – lovingly called “NaNoWriMo” by those of us crazy enough to participate!

What does this mean?

It means I, and a few thousand of my closest friends, will be using every spare moment this November to type, scribble, scrawl or hunt ‘n peck 50,000 words of a brand new novel.

It also means that such things as laundry, dishes, holiday shopping and showers will all be forgotten in the mad rush to complete a novel and reach our goal in those short (and if you’ve never tried to write 50,000 words in a month, you don’t know how short) 30 days.

So if you have a friend, a roommate, a daughter, sister, son, brother, uncle, cousin, spouse who is participating in NaNoWriMo this year, do us all and especially them a favor and give your hope, your support, your good wishes to them this November. We’ll need it. And we also wouldn’t mind if you came over with some dinner, either. Just don’t expect us to be able to talk and scribble at the same time.

This year, I’m planning to up the stakes even more. This is my seventh NaNo’ing year, and I had this whim that perhaps working full time AND writing a 50k novel in 30 days wasn’t quite enough pressure. (HA!) So I’ve also opened a NaNo fund-raising page over at the NaNo-recommended Gift Tool site. I’ve only put in a goal of $100. I don’t know if I can manage it, but I think together we can.

If you’d like to support me, and thereby also make a contribution to a worthwhile program for young writers – which also happens to be part of a 501(c)3 organization, which makes any donation you make tax deductible – please click here and donate what you can. I’m not picky, and neither are these young writers. Support the next generation’s authors. Even if it’s $1, or $5 or even 50 cents.

If you’d like to find out more about National Novel Writing Month – click here. If you decide you want to sign up to write your own novel, you can create an account from there.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been trading writing prompts with a friend (who shall remain nameless until such a time as she lets me know she’d like to be revealed). Every other week, we exchange a prompt as a challenge and write a short story. We then trade the stories for critique. I have to say that I really think the whole thing has been working out quite well overall.

There have been a couple of weeks, though, where I’ve kind of just stared at the page until a day or two before the deadline and then banged something out quickly, with little thought to craft or plot. I’m not too lofty to admit it. But there have also been two prompts that stand out in my mind like a torch readied to spark the bonfire.

That’s what they were, too. The first prompt lead to what I call my “Amazonian wild west murder mystery”. I haven’t even opened the critique on this yet, because it would hurt my heart if my writing partner hated it. One day soon, when I’m ready to revisit Deadtown (as the story is called), I’ll open the critique and take a look at it. Until then, I’m a little bit too in love with the idea to take constructive criticism. Yet. Every writer needs to take it eventually, but I see no harm in realizing when you’re not ready for it yet.

The second prompt I received this week, and while the story isn’t written yet, I have the beginning, middle, and end all laid out in my mind. I’m a little bit in love with this idea, too. You see, Sunday evening I had only the vaguest idea of what story this prompt had, well, prompted in my mind.

Then I went to sleep and dreamed the whole thing. I love it when my subconscious reaches out and gives me a helping hand. I watched from a little floaty corner of the room as a teenage girl, a thin coward of a man, and a voluptuous priestess drank cold bottles of ale in a dirty stone tavern and discussed their history together. I then observed what happened next, and had my ending.

And in the morning, I woke up and scribbled the whole thing down as fast as my fingers could fly.

It was all there for the taking: compelling characters, the taste and smells and sounds of the setting, and the action-packed climax, followed by an ending that could break a heart. *happy sigh*